Apple

It turns out that Apple may have been responsible not just for the seeming current downturn in innovating its own products, but contributing to some "missing" parts in the competition as well. Notice that cute "dimple" behind Google's Nexus 6 -- manufactured by Motorola hence the dimple has Motorola's logo? Well, news has come out that it should have been a tappy fingerprint sensor. But circumstances have been so that Motorola wasn't able to include that in that final design.

Chinese upstart and smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi recently revealed the secret behind its surprisingly massive success — with more than 60 million units sold for 2014 alone — that has allowed it to become the world’s third top-selling phone maker, beating out more established brands Apple and Samsung in China.

Samsung has turned a new coin, in a sense, to look for a new design for their upcoming smartphone collection. They'll be doing this by bringing in a man who happened to be former CEO of Tangerine, the London-based design company that at one time employed Apple’s design leader Jony Ive. Lee Don-tae, is now reporting to Samsung Electronics President Toon Boo-keun and will be engaging with the company’s Design Management Center.

Google Glass is flying to a new nest - that nest being Tony Fadell, co-founder and CEO of Google-owned smart thermostat group Nest. Google Glass jumped out of the experimental Google X division Thursday and on to Fadell’s list of responsibilities. Almost exactly a year ago, Google bought out Nest for $3.2 billion. Maybe Fadell can use his management skills to boost something new and make a comeback with Glass.

Samsung just went past Apple when it comes to customer satisfaction at least by two points. This is according to the recent American Consumer Satisfaction Index which surveyed 70,000 consumers before 2014 ends. The results are in and show that Samsung beat Apple with a score of 81. That's also a huge increase from the South Korean giant's score of 76 last year. Meanwhile, Apple's score went down more than two points from last year.

Early Christmas gift or hell freezing over (again)? Rockstar Consortium (not to be confused with Rockstar, the game developers) and patent clearinghouse RPX have announced an agreement that would transfer ownership of 4,000 patents that the consortium owns over to RPX. And as part of that agreement, Rockstar has agreed to drop all ongoing patent lawsuits against the likes of Samsung, LG, and HTC. Sadly for Google and Cisco, this announcement comes after they've agreed to settle a similar patent squabble with Rockstar last month.

The relatively warm acceptance of Apple Pay – Apple’s wireless payment system that allows owners of the latest iPhone models to wave their smartphone instead of swiping your card to pay – has probably forced Samsung to look for a competing system using its own line of smartphones. The South Korean gadget giant is reportedly in talks with US payments startup LoopPay to make this happen.

Chinese sources have leaked what they purport to be specs of the new HTC flagship phone that will be launched possibly during the Mobile World Congress in Berlin, March 2015. The possible HTC One M9 is said to bring a larger screen, or one version with a larger screen, as Apple did.

It has now become a race as to which proprietary technology will be able to revolutionize the way merchants and businesses interact with our smartphones. After Apple announced their iBeacon in the middle of last year, which they said would simplify payments and offers for retailers, there hasn't been much major development from their end, and many consider it still in the initial infancy stages. Now Samsung has announced they are working with several systems to be able to bring the Proximity Platform to retailers and consumers.

Apple’s iMessage bug has been affecting a lot of Android users but it’s only now that the Cupertino company has finally released some fixes. Android fans who have been trying to use the iMessage have been experiencing problems especially when it comes to using their old numbers used for the messaging service. Problem was the ex-iPhone users who still wanted to use their iMessage accounts or numbers haven’t been receiving texts and messages because their cellphone number was still associated with Apple’s SMS system.